Two Minutes With...Dom Sagolla

Thursday

May 17, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Dom Sagolla himself isnít a household name, but his creations are. One of the original developers of social media site Twitter and the Adobe creative suite (ever hear of photoshop?), Sagolla now works in the app design industry with his San Francisco company DollarApp. We caught up with him before his address to Becker graduates to talk about his creations, his book and why there are only 140 characters allowed in a tweet.

Dom Sagolla himself isn&rsquo;t a household name, but his creations are. One of the original developers of social media site Twitter and the Adobe creative suite (ever hear of photoshop?), Sagolla now works in the app design industry with his San Francisco company DollarApp. We caught up with him before his address to Becker graduates to talk about his creations, his book and why there are only 140 characters allowed in a tweet.

Did you just get in to Worcester yesterday? Actually, I&rsquo;ve been here since Friday. I stayed with a best friend from college who lives in Winchester, so not so far.

Here at Becker College they&rsquo;ve started this MassDIGI program and the state is trying to pass tax credits to encourage videogame design and entrepreneurs to come here. And you&rsquo;re doing all this work with app development now. Is that going to be as profitable an industry as videogame design? It&rsquo;s been four years since the [Apple&rsquo;s] App Store launched and the word &ldquo;app&rdquo; kind of came into parlance around then. I&rsquo;ve seen an explosion of just the types of things you can do in this tiny, 3.5 inch diameter space [gesturing to a smart phone]. It&rsquo;s already huge. Monstrous. You can look at what Apple&rsquo;s reporting in terms of numbers. They&rsquo;ve already paid out $30 billion to developers, and that&rsquo;s just the developers&rsquo; share. And they keep a share too. It&rsquo;s a much bigger piece of the pie than a lot of people realize.

Nintendo reported its first ever loss for the year and I heard they were attributing that to the rise of videogames being played on phones rather than people going out and buying a Wii. One of my projects is converting Xbox titles to iPad. A recent game &ndash; I can&rsquo;t tell you the name but the one we&rsquo;re working on now &ndash; is actually better on iPad. It&rsquo;s a better experience on iPad than it is on Xbox.

How come? Touch. All about touch. It&rsquo;s the same experience but the immediacy and the response you get from the touch screen on an iPad is just so entrancing.

And Microsoft doesn&rsquo;t mind that people can buy the iPad version? They don&rsquo;t have anything to do with it. It&rsquo;s the titles that want to be on iPad. They want to be on the platform that has the most uptake. These people come to us and say &ldquo;I want my title on iPad.&rdquo; We have a way to do that now. For this [game] launch that I just mentioned you should pay attention to www.chaoticmoon.com.

What do you plan on telling Becker students in your commencement speech today? What are your words of advice to graduates? I like to think in threes. The speech has three major messages. The first is simplicity is its own reward. The second is embrace constraints because constraints enable creativity. The third is find what you are best at doing and focus on that. Find what you love to do and do that. It&rsquo;s about focus and I look at all graduates like little start-ups and I think focus is the main ingredient to a start-up.

And that translates beyond programming and software development. It&rsquo;s good for anything. For example it&rsquo;s good for if you&rsquo;re a writer it&rsquo;s about finding what about writing excites you. What among that discipline can you be the best at doing? If you&rsquo;re a nursing student, why? Why does this thing excite you so much? Expressing that, that&rsquo;s so important. And finding your personal brand I think is relevant to any discipline. &nbsp;

I liked what you said about constraints. You really have to think differently to work around them. That is one of the most freeing aspects of Twitter, for me, is that 140 character constraint and the fact that it&rsquo;s immutable. You can&rsquo;t change it once it&rsquo;s out there. And the fact that you have this asymmetrical relationship where you can follow someone but they don&rsquo;t have to follow you back. I just love that constraint. I think that&rsquo;s freeing. It&rsquo;s daunting but it&rsquo;s amazing what people will do with that.

Where did that 140 number come from? I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;re asked that all the time. It actually came from our ambition to fit the entire experience inside a text message. And the text message itself has an interesting history. It was part of the standard for Global Standard for Messaging (GSM) which includes a test message. When you have a cell phone the system has to have text messaging as part of it to make sure that the thing&rsquo;s on. So the engineer that&rsquo;s designing the spec is writing in the texting framework and he&rsquo;s trying to decide how long to make this message. The story goes he sat down and wrote a lot of examples from literature and sentences to his mom, quotes from history, and then did an average and came up with 160 and wrote that into the spec. So we had to fit within that. Retroactively we realized that that is actually a limitation in the way our brains work. There&rsquo;s an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar and he has something that he calls Dunbar&rsquo;s number, which is around 155. So between 140 and 160, somewhere in there, is a cognitive limit that we have as humans to remember and parse information.

So it&rsquo;s like your brain only works in phrases of 150, 160 characters? That&rsquo;s about the length of a sentence. It just shows up in all these places. It&rsquo;s also the limitation of your outer circle of social network. It&rsquo;s about as many people as you can remember their first and last names, where they live and when you saw them last. There are other numbers in a golden ratio that climb from 1 to 150. If you study Robin Dunbar you can understand the anthropological roots of that number.

How long ago was this? That was like the 1980s. The spec got adopted in the 1990s. He just discovered purely by just a survey of literature, basically. In my book I did a survey as well. It turns out that almost all the forms have an analogue that fits inside 140 characters. Poetry, you have a haiku. Journalism, you have the headline or the kicker or the lede sentence. In other forms there&rsquo;s always one specific type that fits inside the one sentence constraint. I think these constraints are freeing. They enable creativity. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

So why knock it down to 140 after you were at 160? 140 is to leave space for the user name. So you have 19 characters for the user name, then the colon, space and then the rest of the message.

I use Twitter for work and I just had my 1,000th tweet the other day. Congratulations.

Thank you. It&rsquo;s great branding. It&rsquo;s amazing how much I can reach out to readers. I&rsquo;ve gotten tips, I&rsquo;ve gotten interviews. Are you seeing Twitter become what you wanted it to be when it was first created? What we had at first we didn&rsquo;t know what it was best at. I think a lot of us didn&rsquo;t. I personally saw the use right away because I was an English major and I had computer science as my minor so I understood the power of hyper-text. That, I think, is one of the aspects of Twitter that people ignore. It&rsquo;s not just characters but an action behind that word, behind that link, saving you steps from impulse to action. I think that is the essence of the advantage that you have using Twitter. Yes, it&rsquo;s 140 characters but it&rsquo;s alive. You have much more context and depth than you see immediately. If you can read the link you know where you&rsquo;re going. Once you tap on that link you&rsquo;re taken to an entirely different context. And each tweet, there&rsquo;s all this meta-data behind it. It&rsquo;s like an iceberg. Underneath the water there&rsquo;s the time it was sent, where it was sent, who it was sent to, who it was sent from, what that person has on their profile, the picture that person has on their profile. So I think people mistakenly characterize it as limiting when it&rsquo;s quite freeing. If you think about the context it has so much more meaning.

It&rsquo;s totally changed the way I interact with computers now. I don&rsquo;t bookmark websites anymore because I just follow them on Twitter. I&rsquo;ve stopped reading headline news and I just read my tweets now.

I saw someone say, on Twitter, that waking up now and checking your Twitter is today&rsquo;s version of waking up and reading the newspaper. It&rsquo;s part of my habit, for sure.

Another thing that I love about it is you have direct access. As a reporter, to talk to certain people usually you have to go through PR or agents and now you have unfettered access to anything people just want to put out there. I used to laugh over news stories about what Kanye West wrote on Twitter but sometimes you sort of have to talk about what people are saying on Twitter. Especially if it&rsquo;s them. And you can usually tell if it&rsquo;s them because it&rsquo;s very hard to BS at 140 characters. There&rsquo;s not a lot of space to hide.

Are you still affiliated with Twitter? To the extent that my book is in their Hall of Fame, yes, but I don&rsquo;t work for them.

But you were a co-creator of it. Yes, there were 14 of us at the company that proceeded Twitter and I was the head of quality. I was the test engineer. So I got break it first and I&rsquo;m user number 9. That&rsquo;s my claim to fame.

When did you move on from Twitter? It&rsquo;s a little bit of a long story. The early movement from that podcasting company that we had where the [Twitter] idea was brought to life, to the actual company of Twitter incorporated was a year-long process of laying a bunch of us off, incubating it for a while and then spinning off this other company. As part of that most of us were let go and I was let go pretty early because I&rsquo;m a pretty big trouble maker. No one appreciates Quality Assurance.

Is the Twitter we see now still the same as when you were there? They&rsquo;ve changed the way they talk about it, they&rsquo;ve changed the way they&rsquo;ve designed the website. But the constraints are the same, the 140 characters, hypertext, asymmetrical relationships are all the same as when we started it.

When did Twitter start? The first tweet was on March 21, 2006. It was sent by Jack Dorsey, the creator, the guy who came up with the idea and really was the lead engineer on it. He started the conversation with me. His first message was &ldquo;Waiting for Dom to update more.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s tweet number 35. My response, was &ldquo;Oh, this is going to be addictive.&rdquo; I was there like a fly on the wall taking notes and that&rsquo;s how I ended up writing my book.

Your book [140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form] is sort of like a Strunk & White for this new method of communication. Did you look at Strunk & White when you were writing the book? Absolutely. Strunk had a lot of these tips and White who did a massive edit. The way I did mine was I had my editor at my agency and I just wrote as much as I could get and she cut it to pieces. The way I look at it is there&rsquo;s Strunk & White, Shakespeare, Whitman, there are all these folks who are extremely good at the short-form and I just took that inspiration and did a survey of literature and saw what could fit inside that tiny space and put it all inside 200 pages. There&rsquo;s a certain irony to writing 200 pages about 140 characters but I tried to make it relevant to any discipline. Great for any social network, great for email. Great for writing headlines. Obituaries. Great for writing poetry. Great for quotations and these quips that people have, the soundbite culture we have. It&rsquo;s good for so many disciplines.

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